Whichever your target audience might be, chances are they are active on some kind of social media – there are officially 2 billion users on Facebook, 1.5 billion users on YouTube and the 700 million users on Instagram.Whichever your target audience might be, chances are they are active on some kind of social media – there are officially 2 billion users on Facebook, 1.5 billion users on YouTube and the 700 million users on Instagram.

One of the things marketing managers can do is to make a deep audience analysis, use it for the strategic social media mix and engage the followers directly with personalized and relevant content.

It takes a lot of effort to switch between social media accounts, to post engaging content on “hot” topics and to be online for every message or comment, but with platforms likeSalesforce Marketing Cloudand Social Studio you can do this seamlessly easily.

Experienced marketing managers will agree that the key to success is to get to know your clients, but every client is unique and expects relevant communication. This level of knowledge is now possible with Salesforce Social Studio.

Here are the 4 ways of using customer data and gaining new clients through social media:

1. Listen to your target groups

With social listening, you can collect useful feedback about current conversations, posts, and comments from users on social media based on keywords set by you. This can help you in catching your brand or product sentiment and in building your future social marketing strategy on the collected data. With a complete platform for social media management such as Social Studio you may even monitor the information flow through artificial intelligence which investigates sentiment trends and recognizes related images to boost your social listening to the next level.

• Invest in building a personalized approach in customer service to better address the needs of both current and potential customers

3. Create shopping opportunities at all times

In addition to creating social media content, you can use several types of content that can bring you instant conversions. For example, on Facebook you can add a "Shop" section to your page and use the "tag" option to mark a product from your Facebook Shop in the images and videos that you post. When users click on the products in your posts, they will be directed to the relevant product page in your Facebook Shop where they can complete the purchase. You can tag products from your online or Facebook Shop into a post or Story in Instagram as well, which will take the new users back to a product page where they can complete their order.

4. Measure and improve your campaigns in real time

With Marketing Command Centre, you can measure the campaign success in the various channels as well as to track the path of the individual client by channel ("customer journey").

"By 2020, 90% of the customer service will take place on social networks."

- Gartner

How Lids uses Salesforce to attract new customers

One of the most important components of any strategy for attracting or retaining customers is a committed and responsible customer service team on social media. A few years ago, the Lids Sporting Goods featured the Lids Press Box, a command center, based on Social Studio as part of the Marketing Cloud. The Press Box allows you to track strategic social networking topics in real time, to monitor the performance of your competition, to maintain ongoing customer relations, and more.

Six months after the Press Box release, Lids page followers have doubled from 495,000 to 800,000, which would take years otherwise. "We know we need to have a stronger digital presence, in social networks, as well as to be more loyal to our customers, “says Jeff Pearson, Senior Vice President of Marketing and E-commerce at Lids.

“This is what our clients expect from us. They want to communicate with brands through social media.”